Between Pulpit and Pew

The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore

edited by W. Paul Reeve and Michael Scott Van Wagenen

Publication Year: 2011

Mormons gave distinctive meanings to supernatural legends and events, but their narratives incorporated motifs found in many cultures. Many such historical legends and beliefs found adherents down to the present. This collection employs folklore to illuminate the cultural and religious history of a people.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword

It is significant that historians, whose work is to gather facts to
chronicle and interpret the past, have chosen to better understand the
history of Mormons in Utah by looking at their folklore, including their
expressions of the supernatural. This interdisciplinary approach, combining
the methods of history and folklore studies, adds a new...

1. Between Pulpit and Pew: Where History and Lore Intersect

In 1995, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote the best-selling book, The
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. According to
Sagan, the modern world could yet be set free from its enduring state
of ignorance through the rejection of irrational belief and the acceptance
of the scientific method.

2. A Mormon Bigfoot: David Patten’s Cain and the Conception of Evil in LDS Folklore

In the spring of 1835, while serving a mission in Tennessee and
staying with the family of Abraham O. Smoot, a future stake president
in and mayor of Salt Lake City and Provo, the LDS apostle David W.
Patten, claimed to have seen Cain. Lycurgus Wilson’s 1900 biography of
Patten reprinted a letter Smoot sent to Joseph F. Smith in...

3. “As Ugly as Evil,” and “As Wicked as Hell”: Gadianton Robbers and the Legend Process among the Mormons

On a spring day in 1874, carpenter Charles Pulsipher busied
himself putting the finishing touches on a new home in the town
of Hebron in southwestern Utah. Things were likely calm and pleasant
as Pulsipher went about his work in this small Mormon ranching
community, rooted in the south end of the Escalante Desert...

4. Raising the Dead: Mormons, Evangelicals, and Miracles in America

The power to raise the dead was among the gifts Christ gave his
twelve apostles. The Gospel of Matthew records that he “commanded
them, saying, Go . . . and as ye go, preach, saying ‘The kingdom of
heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast
out devils; freely ye have received, freely give.’” Later, Paul...

For all of its modern-day resonance, the above narrative is
not a description of a human-alien encounter from the twenty-first
century. Instead, this is an 1841 article from Times and Seasons,
the official newspaper of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. Purported to be the visionary dream of a “believer in the...

6. A Currency of Faith: Taking Stock in Utah County’s Dream Mine

In May 2007, a crowd assembled in the convention hall at the veterans’
center in Spanish Fork, Utah, for the Relief Mine Company’s
annual stockholders’ meeting. An almost festive air preceded the
official meeting, as about one hundred people gathered, investors
in the company who had come to hear the annual financial report...

7. A Nessie in Mormon Country

The twenty-seven-year-old son of Mormon apostle Charles C. Rich
further explained that the local Indians believed in a “monster animal”
that had been known to capture and carry away individuals who swam
in the lake. Although the Indians had not seen the monster in several
years, they described it as being serpentine with legs about eighteen...

8. Walking on Water: Nineteenth-Century Prophets and a Legend of Religious Imposture

“The Biblical statement from John 4:44, ‘A prophet hath no
honor in his own country,’ is certainly true of Joseph Smith.”² So
spoke Charles J. Decker, town historian of Afton, New York, during
a lecture sponsored by the Presbytery of Susquehanna Valley
in 1977, nearly 150 years after Smith had left the area. Like most...

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